AL East

Jon Lester is a name known throughout Major League Baseball as much for his battle with cancer as his pitching ability.

Lester had solid 2008 and 2009 seasons for the Red Sox before a serious coming out party in 2010. With a 19-9 record and a 3.25 ERA, Lester attended his first All Star Game and finished fourth in Cy Young voting.

All signs point to Lester, 27, continuing to improve in 2011. With a revamped roster and loftier expectations he is due for a stellar season.

Via Jack Curry of the YES Network:

The Yankees are still monitoring the very thin starting pitcher market, but don’t expect them to sign Jeremy Bonderman.

If there is a starter on the free agent market with a questionable injury history the Yankees are apparently in on him.

Well they are supposedly “stepping up their pursuit” of one questionable starter, former A’s starter Justin Duchscherer according to Jerry Crasnick of ESPN.

Duchscherer, 33, has suffered a myriad of injuries and even clinical depression that has derailed a once promising career.

Last week, WEEI's Alex Speier reported that Mike Cameron had no wish to leave Boston. Despite an offseason that clearly puts Cameron as the fourth OF on a solid outfield—both offensively and defensively—the 38-year-old vet with 16 years of MLB service is content with his role as a backup.

The Red Sox have listened to offers for Cameron and probably will continue to do so for the rest of the offseason. After all, Cameron is due a hefty $7.25 million for the remainder of 2011.

With Boston's offseason spending spree and Tampa Bay's everything-must-go jumble sale, one can make a pretty good stab at how the AL East will play out in 2011.

The Yankees and Red Sox will fight it out for the top spot, the Blue Jays and Rays will compete for third and fourth and the Orioles will still languish at the bottom.

Obviously, any of the bottom three could make a run to the postseason as the Rays did in 2008, but it would be a staggering turnaround.

If you asked me three years ago where Andruw Jones would be in 2011, I would rattle off a thousand different answers before settling on "A Major League baseball field."

Literally, 1,000 different answers. Gas station attendant. Universal Studios tour guide. Dave & Buster's skee ball maintenance man. Grifter. Anything but a big-league ballplayer.

The latest name spinning on the pinstripe rumor mill is five-time All-Star and 10-time Gold Glove winner Andruw Jones.
 
Don’t get excited just yet Yankee fans, as Jones is far cry from the star he once was as an Atlanta Brave.
 
Currently, Jones is a 33-year-old, washed-up center-fielder who sat atop the most elite of hitters list from 1997-2007.
 

I am the first sports fan to admit that statistics spin tall tales as much as they inform.

While number-crunching has allowed us to distill fact from fiction when it comes to performance, stats have also cloaked deceptively bad players under the immunity blanket known as triple crown categories.

Stats are as damning to players as much as they immortalize (see Maris, Roger), and despite several encyclopedic volumes of evidence to the contrary, they are why Yuniesky Betancourt keeps finding work.

"No" is not a familiar word heard in the New York Yankees front office.

General manager Brian Cashman has the resources to woo players to come play in the Bronx, so what happened this offseason?

It has to be expected that the Yankees sans Mr. George Steinbrenner lost a little bit of their appeal.

One of the biggest questions surrounding the baseball world this offseason involves the bat of Toronto's newest slugger, Jose Bautista.

Last season, Bautista's on-again, off-again relationship with the home run had many fantasy owners perplexed as to what type of player he truly was.